Competing Perspectives on the Link between Strategic Information Technology Alignment and Organizational Agility: Insights from a Mediation Model1

Strategic information technology alignment remains a top priority for business and IT executives. Yet with a recent rise in environmental volatility, firms are asking how to be more agile in identifying and responding to market-based threats and opportunities. Whether alignment helps or hurts agility is an unresolved issue. This paper presents a variety of arguments from the literature that alternately predict a positive or negative relationship between alignment and agility. This relationship is then tested using a model in which agility mediates the link between alignment and firm performance under varying conditions of IT infrastructure flexibility and environmental volatility. Using data from a matched…